A Critical Perspective on Online Safety Measures

The Nordic countries have enjoyed mass use of the Internet at home and in schools since the mid-1990’s. Children have been noted to have rapidly taken the Internet into possession and to have made use of the affordances (Greeno, 1994) of Internet communication. However, media coverage of how children take on, and learn what the Internet has to offer has often been of a negative kind. Blazing headlines portray a generation in bottomless danger where children are defined both as possible victims and perpetrators. Another common attribute of this media coverage is the exoticising of young people’s net cultures – describing the young and their cultures as profoundly different from earlier generations and elevating the “colourful and the bizarre” (Coffey et al., 1999, p. 169) to a level where it appears normal for this particular generation. In this setting safe use guides – tips for parents and children on how to keep safe on the Internet – began to appear. They were often composed by teachers, concerned parents, non-governmental organisations and in some cases governments. The safe use guides were disseminated online in different forums aimed at concerned adults. In this article I will give a brief description of current online safety issues and examine them critically. My earlier research – 104 interviews with 12-year old Swedes conducted in 2004-2005 (Dunkels, 2007) and a study of European safe use guides conducted in 2008 (Lüders et al., 2009) left me with a number of questions. I could see that safe use guides were strikingly similar, despite their origin, and I could see that they rested upon norms and values that were actually neither accounted for nor even declared. This article is a literature review of the area with the aim of critically discussing some of these questions